The Man with the Clubfoot eBook

The man in green stopped at the door. Holding
up a warning hand to me, he bent his head and listened.
There was a moment of absolute silence. Not a
sound was to be heard throughout the whole Castle.
Then the man in green knocked softly and was admitted,
leaving me outside.

A moment later, the door swung open again. A
tall, elegant man with grey hair and that indefinite
air of good breeding that you find in every man who
has spent a life at court, came out hurriedly.
He looked pale and harassed.

On seeing me, he stopped short.

“Dr. Grundt? Where is Dr. Grundt?”
he asked and his eyes dropped to my feet. He
started and raised them to my face.

The trooper had drifted out of earshot. I could
see him, immobile as a statue, standing at the end
of the corridor. Except for him and us, the passage
was deserted.

Again the elderly man spoke and his voice betrayed
his anxiety.

“Who are you?” he asked almost in a whisper.
“What have you done with Grundt? Why has
he not come?”

Boldly I took the plunge.

“I am Semlin,” I said.

“Semlin,” echoed the other, “—­ah
yes! the Embassy in Washington wrote about you—­but
Grundt was to have come....”

“Listen,” I said, “Grundt could
not come. We had to separate and he sent me on
ahead....”

“But ... but ...”—­the man was
stammering now in his anxiety—­“...
you succeeded?”

I nodded.

He heaved a sigh of relief.

“It will be awkward, very awkward, this change
in the arrangements,” he said. “You
will have to explain everything to him, everything.
Wait there an instant.”

He darted back into the room.

Once more I stood and waited in that silent place,
so restful and so still that one felt oneself in a
world far removed from the angry strife of nations.
And I wondered if my interview—­the meeting
I had so much dreaded—­was at an end.

“Pst, Pst!” The elderly man stood at the
open door.

He led me through a room, a cosy place, smelling pleasantly
of leather furniture, to a door. He opened it,
revealing across a narrow threshold another door.
On this he knocked.

CHAPTER IX

I ENCOUNTER AN OLD ACQUAINTANCE WHO LEADS ME TO A DELIGHTFUL SURPRISE

He stood in the centre of the room, facing the door,
his legs, straddled apart, planted firmly on the ground,
one hand behind his back, the other, withered and
useless like the rest of the arm, thrust into the
side pocket of his tunic. He wore a perfectly
plain undress uniform of field-grey, and the unusual
simplicity of his dress, coupled with the fact that
he was bare-headed, rendered him so unlike his conventional
portraits in the full panoply of war that I doubt if
I should have recognized him—­paradoxical
as it may seem—­but for the havoc depicted
in every lineament of those once so familiar features.